Interesting post. I think it might be useful to examine the intuition that hierarchy is undesirable, though.
It seems like you might want to separate out equality in terms of power from equality in terms of welfare. Most of the benefits from hierarchy seem to be from power inequality (let the people who are the most knowledgable and the most competent make important decisions). Most of the costs come in the form of welfare inequality (decision-makers co-opting resources for themselves). (The best argument against this frame would probably be something about the average person having self-actualization, freedom, and mastery of their destiny. This could be a sense in which power equality and welfare equality are the same thing.)
Robin Hanson’s “vote values, bet beliefs” proposal is an intriguing way to get the benefits of inequality without the costs. You have the decisions being made by wealthy speculators, who have a strong financial incentive to leave the prediction market if they are less knowledgable and competent than the people they’re betting against. But all those brains get used in the service of achieving values that everyone in society gets equal input on. So you have a lot of power inequality but a lot of welfare equality. Maybe you could even address the self-actualization point by making that one of the values that people vote on somehow. (Also, it’s not clear to me that voting on values rather than politicians actually represents loss of freedom to master your destiny etc.)
I think a background belief (based on some half-remembered writings of Sarah) is that power inequality often fairly directly causes welfare inequality.
Interesting post. I think it might be useful to examine the intuition that hierarchy is undesirable, though.
It seems like you might want to separate out equality in terms of power from equality in terms of welfare. Most of the benefits from hierarchy seem to be from power inequality (let the people who are the most knowledgable and the most competent make important decisions). Most of the costs come in the form of welfare inequality (decision-makers co-opting resources for themselves). (The best argument against this frame would probably be something about the average person having self-actualization, freedom, and mastery of their destiny. This could be a sense in which power equality and welfare equality are the same thing.)
Robin Hanson’s “vote values, bet beliefs” proposal is an intriguing way to get the benefits of inequality without the costs. You have the decisions being made by wealthy speculators, who have a strong financial incentive to leave the prediction market if they are less knowledgable and competent than the people they’re betting against. But all those brains get used in the service of achieving values that everyone in society gets equal input on. So you have a lot of power inequality but a lot of welfare equality. Maybe you could even address the self-actualization point by making that one of the values that people vote on somehow. (Also, it’s not clear to me that voting on values rather than politicians actually represents loss of freedom to master your destiny etc.)
This is also interesting.
I think a background belief (based on some half-remembered writings of Sarah) is that power inequality often fairly directly causes welfare inequality.
(fake edit: she links to an older post of hers that talks about the physiological effects of status regulation among mammals: https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/patriarchy-is-the-problem/)